David Cameron’s judgement over his alliances with the far right in Europe calls fundamentally into question his credibility as a leader who purports to become Prime Minister of Britain. His silence on the past of the senior figures in the European Conservatives and Reformists, the Tories’ new bedfellows in the European Parliament, is a searing indictment of that judgement. The more so, the longer it continues.
His attempt to persuade the maverick and fanatically anti-EU Czech president Vaclav Klaus to delay ratification of the Lisbon treaty until a Tory government might be elected in this country – which has shown some signs of success – is an almost traitorous act against his own Government by a leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. It is an attempt to enlist the help of a foreign leader to undermine the policy of an elected British Government for the Conservative Party’s political interests. It treats the Czech parliament, which has voted to ratify the treaty, with contempt. It does not inspire confidence in Mr Cameron’s potential standing on the international stage.
Indeed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is so concerned about Mr Cameron’s alliance with hardline anti-Germans on the Polish right that she has withdrawn her
(conservative) party’s representative in London and effectively broken links with the British Tories, with whom they were until recently grouped in the European Parliament.
It is not difficult to see why, given the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, homophobic, climate-change deniers Mr Cameron has decided to ally the Tories with. His party’s leader in Europe, Michal Kaminski, is making efforts to deny his anti-Semitic past, yet still issues disgraceful calls for apologies “by the Jewish nation” to balance Polish ones on the burning alive of 300 Jews in the town of Jedwabne, in north-eastern Poland, in 1941. The Tories’ Latvian partners in the ECR join in the commemoration of the heroism of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen SS.
As Foreign Secretary David Miliband said recently: “There will be incredulity in Washington, Beijing and Delhi, never mind Berlin and Paris, that a party aspiring to government in Britain – the party of Winston Churchill no less – chooses allies like this.” Not to mention the rifts it has caused in the Jewish community.
In a desperate bid to quell the volcanic anti-European rebels in his party by leaving the pro-EU Christian conservative grouping which includes Chancellor Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and others such as the Swedish Moderate Party, Mr Cameron has committed an act of dangerous folly about which it is being too generous to say, as its defenders quietly do, that it was the product of insufficient research by the Tory Party.
Mr Cameron, who denounces the British equivalents of his European allies, needs to remove this taint from the Tories because it taints the whole of British politics. He should take the Tories out of the ECR, condemn Mr Kaminsky’s stand on the Jedwabne massacre and the commemoration of the Latvian Waffen SS. Otherwise he will continue to give succour to the rise in what one of his own former MEPs, expelled in a row over the new alliance, called “respectable fascism”.
